More of Less, please
The lengths humans will go to avoid embarrassment, responsibility and the possibility of failure know no bounds. Those bounds are stretched to their geographical limit in Less, Andrew Sean Greer’s delightful Pulitzer Prize-winning global romp.
Our hero is Arthur Less, a man who is the very definition of tragicomedy. A boiling pot of external and internal contradictions, Less is a small-time writer best known for having been the paramour of a well-respected poet for much of his life.
Having spent the last decade with a much younger man, who seemingly never loved him, Less is distraught when an invitation to his wedding arrives. Thus, his first horribly middleclass problem arises; he can’t possibly show his face and suffer through the ceremony, yet to simply refuse would be its own embarrassment.
Instead, Less rifles through his mail and compiles a round-the-world trip — paid for mostly by other people and organisations — crafting a perfect, intricately overdone alibi that kicks off this wonderfully witty adventure.
We travel from New York to Mexico, Italy to Germany, Morocco to India; the world is vast yet the plot is brief, delivering succinct episodic voyages that follow the same philosophically personal chain of thought as Less stumbles neurotically towards his 50th birthday. It is a concise, pithy story but Less is substantial in its themes. Greer’s words are carefully chosen so they dance across the page, leaping from comedy to romance to sadness to profound nuggets of wisdom, often in the same sentence.
He has knitted Less’ journey together tightly, so the past and present flow seamlessly, allowing his story and world to reveal itself to the audience slowly and naturally, like meeting a new best friend. When you reach the final chapter, Less certainly feels like one.
The profound relationship we build with our failed hero is Less’ great trick. Less is a buffoon — one character describes his life as being “all comedy”, an insult and accolade in one — and his problems as bourgeois as they come. Yet his journey is universal and Greer’s beautifully wise and sparklingly hilarious dialogue reaches across the particulars of his hero’s life.
Parts of his story may only be relevant to gay, middle-aged authors but much of Less’ journey is ours as well. His disregard for revealing truths, his ceaseless worrying, his increasingly heightening apprehension, his desperation to be free of past thoughts and feelings; Less is a treat for the mind and soul, a manifesto for the anxious that will cast the world in a new, blond-haired, blue-suited glow.